Muncie And Other Communities Receive Community Crossings Grants For Road Projects

In the midst of a coronavirus response update this week, Governor Eric Holcomb announced new money for more than 200 Hoosier communities for road construction projects.  As IPR’s Stephanie Wiechmann reports, Muncie has been anticipating its award and is ready to use the dollars.

Muncie will receive $703,598.80 for this round of the Community Crossings road grant funding.  Cities the size of Muncie must match 50 percent of the money the state sends.

At his State of the City address in early March, Muncie Mayor Dan Ridenour anticipated being awarded some grant money.  He spoke about the city engineer shoring up missing payments from previous city administrations in a local streets fund that was in the red by $1.9 million.

“Brian [Stephens-Hotopp] has already submitted over a half-million dollars of expenses, all the way back – we’ll just say for several years, for quite a few years.  But he was able to find that much in expenses.  We’ve had to contact people to re-establish where we were on those particular accounts.  We got copies back in.  And we’ve submitted those.  As part of the Crossroads grant, we do expect about $500,000 of that to come back.”

(City of Mu

The city says the grant program will fund nine paving projects.  On the list are portions of Main, High, and Charles streets.

This round of Community Crossings money is coming at a time when traffic is decreasing on most roads because of the COVID-19 stay-at-home order.  Officials say on state roads, traffic has decreased about 40 percent on weekdays and more than 50 percent on weekends.

Here are the other communities awarded Community Crossings grants.

(Map: City of Muncie)